Rising to a Crescendo

When news broke of Martin Amis’s death in May, I ordered a copy of his essay collection The War Against Cliché, and set about learning how to write.

As it turned out, some of the Amisian impulse to strike cliché from the page was already there. For the past few years, I have compiled my own personal word prison, a verbal vending machine where overused words, prosaic words, rancid and disgusting repetitions, awful alliterations, and awkwardly-handled analogies go in, and dopamine comes out.

The idea of a word jail isn’t confined to my Apple Notes pages, though. There’s a reason that publications like the New Yorker or the Guardian have lauded style guides; though they’re usually more concerned with issues like whether it should be “soundworld” or “sound world,” from their general tone, you can get a pretty good idea about what’s hot and what’s not. In a tough moment for classical music journalists living lightyears away from the zeitgeist, I was today years old when I discovered that Gawker (RIP) banned “girlboss,” “vibes,” and “flop era” from its pages as early as October 2021. The Guardian guide’s entry for “clichés is in itself a bit of a cliché, including the tepid, grade C-ers “at this moment in time,” “with all due respect,” and “to be perfectly honest with you,” while somehow overlooking the A-grade skin-crawler, “reaching out.” 

Occasionally, rulings on more specific clichés emerge from behind the curtain. A tweet from Martin Hemming, recalling the banned words and phrases list from the travel section of the Sunday Times, revealed that “chocolate-box” (a descriptor frequently attached to cottagecore English villages), “gems” (especially if they’re hidden), “stunning,” “stunning,” and, finally, “stunning” were automatic no-no’s.

Writing about music is a different beast. Because it’s less tangible, replicable, and relatable, in theory, it’s less possible to have clichéd thoughts about music than it is about travel, what with its “quintessential rolling hills” and its “verdant vistas.” In practice though, that doesn’t preclude music writing from its own brand of clichéd thoughts and/or tired descriptions. (If you’re reading this thinking, who does this dude think he is, I am a serial offender in both the “lazy writing” and the “no time/large space/limited imagination” categories. Recently—embarrassingly recently, in fact—I dreamt up the phrase “a thousand yard stare in a hundred foot room” and thought to myself, Ooh, that sounds original. Rather than: Wow! Your most hackneyed turn of phrase so far! My heart goes out to the scribes writing their 94th artist bio of the day, but if you’re on your first, and it’s your own, there’s really no excuse.)

How do you grapple with cliché? On the one hand, you can, as Amis suggests, ostracize it, confining cliché to a lifetime staring at the four walls of a Notes prison. Alternatively, you can rehabilitate it: study its conventions, engage with it as a way of learning more about a particular world, and eventually let it go, allowing it to live a life freed from the shackles of its original context. I hear the phrase “rising to a crescendo” so often nowadays—and not just because I have listened to nearly all of 262 episodes of the Football Clichés podcast—that my pedantic reflex for that particular eggcorn has been almost wiped out. (This jail favors the first approach, but there’s nothing stopping readers approaching it with a view to the second.)

For the most part, the time for orchestral season announcements—including the most tired spiels from (overworked, underpaid, undervalued) arts marketers—has passed, and we’re fast approaching the season proper, with the whirr of the fresh promotional material and newly minted artist biographies. With that in mind, I decided to ask some people in the classical music business—plus members of the internet community—what they thought were the worst offenders in this particular lexicon. If Tchaikovsky and Beethoven represent the warhorses of our repertoire, what are the warhorses of our vocabulary?